Vision

[dieseltaylor]

Merged into CMBN thread on tank accuracy there was murmurs on speed of target acquisition and how good is spotting.

I have been looking at vision in general and have discovered some things of interest from " A Natural History of Ourselves" by Hannah Holmes.

Humans actually have quite good all round abilities. But to put it into context:

Colour Vision excellent

Humans have three colour receptors and can manage to differentiate around 7 million colours

In mammals two cones give the colours, apart from us primates, therefore their vision is washed out. Birds. lizards and fish have 5 cones tuned.

Perhaps the most interesting from a military point of view was that colour blind men [ 1 in 18 , women 1 in 200] are peculiarly gifted in identifying khaki because of the muted colour vision they have.

A British experiment with swatches with two shades of khaki the colour blind could find 15 shades. The theory being that on a savannah these people were far better and distinguishing camouflaged animals.

Night Vision poor

Night vision comes from the rods which are a thousand times more able in picking up faint light than the cones which give colour and are used for focussing.

Humans have about 17 rods to every cone

The Australian bobtail lizard has roughly 80 cones to the rod which means it is essentially blind at night

Nocturnal animals tend to be primarily rods - the cave roosting oilbird has 123 rods to cones

A crow 2 rods to a cone and is therefore very hampered at night.

The important lesson for humans is to use the sides of your eyes when viewing at night.

Depth of Vision

As a hunter humans have good depth of vision - it works for 120 degrees of the 180 degree area of vision. Incidentally some birds have 360 degrees of vision!

Interestingly as some animals have fixed eyes and not necessarily good stereoscopic vision they bob their heads which means those objects close to them appear to move more than more distant objects - pigeon vision.

Processing speed - well humans do around 20 per second, flies around 200 - so now you know why they fly away so fast!

[dieseltaylor]

Perhaps relevant to Man Utd

What links speed, power, and the color red? Hint: it's not a sports car. It's your muscles.

A new study, published in the latest issue of the journal Emotion, finds that when humans see red, their reactions become both faster and more forceful. And people are unaware of the color's intensifying effect.

The findings may have applications for sporting and other activities in which a brief burst of strength and speed is needed, such as weightlifting. But the authors caution that the color energy boost is likely short-lived.

"Red enhances our physical reactions because it is seen as a danger cue," explains coauthor Andrew Elliot, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a lead researcher in the field of color psychology. "Humans flush when they are angry or preparing for attack," he explains. "People are acutely aware of such reddening in others and it's implications."

But threat is a double-edged sword, argue Elliot and coauthor Henk Aarts, professor of psychology at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. Along with mobilizing extra energy, "threat also evokes worry, task distraction, and self-preoccupation, all of which have been shown to tax mental resources," they write in the paper. In earlier color research, exposure to red has proven counterproductive for skilled motor and mental tasks: athletes competing against an opponent wearing red are more likely to lose and students exposed to red before a test perform worse.

"Color affects us in many ways depending on the context," explains Elliot, whose research also has documented how men and women are unconsciously attracted to the opposite sex when they wear red. "Those color effects fly under our awareness radar," he says.

The study measured the reactions of students in two experiments. In the first, 30 fourth-through-10th graders pinched and held open a metal clasp. Right before doing so, they read aloud their participant number written in either red or gray crayon. In the second experiment, 46 undergraduates squeezed a handgrip with their dominant hand as hard as possible when they read the word "squeeze" on a computer monitor. The word appeared on a red, blue, or gray background.

In both scenarios, red significantly increased the force exerted, with participants in the red condition squeezing with greater maximum force than those in the gray or blue conditions. In the handgrip experiment, not only the amount of force, but also the immediacy of the reaction increased when red was present.

The colors in the study were precisely equated in hue, brightness, and chroma (intensity) to insure that reactions were not attributable to these other qualities of color. "Many color psychology studies in the past have failed to account for these independent variables, so the results have been ambiguous," explains Elliot.

The study focused exclusively on isometric or non-directional physical responses, allowing the researcher to measure the energy response of participants, though not their behavior, which can vary among individuals and situations. The familiar flight or fight responses, for example, show differing reactions to threat.

Provided by University of Rochester

[gunnergoz]

Didn't seem to hurt the Red Army any during the war...their opponents lost! Must have been the sight of all those crimson banners coming at them.

[dieseltaylor]

Study suggests police officer wrongfully convicted for missing the 'obvious'

June 9th, 2011 in Psychology & Psychiatry

Enlarge

Boston police officer Kenny Conley was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice because he claimed not to have seen a brutal police beating as he chased a murder suspect. The conviction was later overturned for technical reasons, but a new study re-examines his claim. Credit: Kenny Conley

In a new study, researchers tested the claims of a Boston police officer who said he ran past a brutal police beating without seeing it. After re-creating some of the conditions of the original incident and testing the perceptions of college students who ran past a staged fight, the researchers found the officer's story plausible.

The study appears in the peer-reviewed open access journal i-Perception.

Psychology professors Christopher Chabris (Union College) and Daniel Simons (University of Illinois) often explore the limits of visual attention – in particular how people regularly fail to spot the obvious. Their most famous experiment involved a video of a "gorilla" walking through a group of people passing basketballs. The unexpected gorilla stopped in the middle of the scene, faced the camera, thumped its chest and then walked off screen. When study subjects were asked to count the number of passes by players wearing white and ignore those of players in black, half of them did not notice the gorilla.

That experiment is an example of what researchers call "inattentional blindness," the failure to see something unexpected if one is focused on something else. Not only can people miss obvious unexpected events, but almost everyone assumes, incorrectly, that they would notice the gorilla, the researchers said.

Chabris and Simons open their recent book, "The Invisible Gorilla," with a discussion of a 1995 case in which police officers brutally beat an undercover officer they thought was a murder suspect. Another officer at the scene, Kenny Conley, did not participate in the beating but ran past it in pursuit of the actual suspect.

Conley, who had climbed a chain-link fence to chase and capture the suspect, admitted that he ran past the spot where the police assault had taken place. But he denied seeing the beating. For this, he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and sentenced to 34 months in prison. (The conviction was later overturned for technical reasons.) The verdict hinged on the belief that Conley must have seen the beating because, by his own testimony, he ran right past it.

To test whether someone could actually run past a fight without seeing it, Chabris and his students set up an experiment in which subjects had to "chase" a researcher for three minutes on a college campus. The subjects, who were tested individually, had to follow the runner at a distance of about 30 feet and count the number of times he touched his head.

On the way, the subjects passed a staged fight about 8 meters (26 feet) off the pathway they were using.

Enlarge

Union College psychology professor Christopher Chabris and his students staged an outdoor fight to study inattentional blindness, the failure to see something unexpected because one's attention is focused on something else. Credit: Matt Milless

"We tried to set up conditions that were as similar as we could to the situation Conley faced while still maintaining experimental control," Chabris said. "Two students were beating up a third, and they were kicking and punching and yelling and coughing." A first study was conducted at night to simulate the original incident. The researchers then repeated the experiment during daylight.

"At night, which was when officer Conley had his experience, only about a third of people noticed the fight," Simons said. "When we did it during the day, over 40 percent still missed it."

"One of the hallmarks of inattentional blindness is that increasing the demands on a person's attention decreases the likelihood that he or she will notice something unexpected," Chabris said.

To verify that inattentional blindness was involved, some study subjects were asked to keep separate counts for the number of times the runner's right hand and left hand touched his head.

"Keeping two counts made them much less likely to notice the fight than keeping no counts," he said.

"Physical exertion can also change your cognitive processing," Chabris said. "Doing something while your heart rate is 140 beats per minute is different than doing it with a heart rate of 60. Officer Conley was chasing a murder suspect at night, scaling a fence, and presumably watching the suspect to see if he had a gun or was discarding anything along the way."

"We can't say with certainty that Conley didn't see the fight," Simons said. "But the study shows that even under less demanding conditions than he must have experienced, it's possible to miss something as obvious as a fight."

Former Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr, who followed the police brutality case over many years and wrote about it in a 2009 book, "The Fence," said the new study "further reinforces the conclusion I eventually reached regarding Kenny Conley not seeing anything," he said. "I think people generally have no idea how much we don't see and perceive."

Had the jurors on the Conley case seen this study, "they would have had the benefit of this kind of science," said Lehr, who now is a professor of journalism at Boston University. "They would have had ample doubt, reasonable doubt, about whether or not Kenny Conley saw the beating."

Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Study suggests police officer wrongfully convicted for missing the 'obvious'." June 9th, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-police-officer-wrongfully-convicted-obvious.html

[dieseltaylor]

Well perhaps we can forgive BF ..... but hey they are smart guys ... : )

DEARBORN, Mich., June 22, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --

• Ford vehicles will feature wider, bolder fonts within vehicle controls and interface screens for easier legibility, particularly among the rapidly increasing number of drivers 60 and older

Fonts will be increased by up to 40 percent starting with the Ford Edge and Explorer arriving in dealers next year and rolling out to other vehicles; new fonts stemmed from customer research

• Font studies have been unfolding since World War II, but legibility has become more important as the number of older people - and older drivers - has increased

Ford will bold and thicken characters on many interior controls across its lineup beginning with the Ford Edge and Ford Explorer next year, making it easier for people of all ages, particularly aging Baby Boomers, to read display fonts.

Ford's legibility study used Ford engineers for the younger subjects and local retirees for the older group. The study found that even small changes in the fonts used in interior graphics can make them easier and quicker for drivers of all ages to read and recognize.

The letters and numbers that form words and convey other information on the center stack display on the next-generation vehicles will be slightly thicker, with an approximately 40 percent wider stroke width. The key is to make the words and numbers a bit bolder, but not overwhelming, said Research Engineer Shannon O'Day. Even with high-tech gadgets and components, simpler often works better - and the key is to pay attention to the width and stroke of the text, allowing them to play off each other.

"If you choose wisely, the legibility of even relatively small text can be a comfortable reading experience," she said. "That is especially helpful for drivers on the move."

O'Day authored "Legibility: Back to Basics," a proprietary Ford study that indicates which fonts provide better legibility for drivers of all ages - looking particularly at the needs and limitations of older drivers. Interestingly, younger drivers experienced issues with many of the same fonts, albeit at a much lower rate.

Today, aging consumers are of great interest to companies including Ford. For the first time, people age 65 and over will outnumber children under the age of 5. It's a transformation that's changing the world, along with all kinds of products in it.

"We know from this study that we can improve the driving experience for many people by bolding the fonts on our controls," said O'Day, who has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and master's degrees in systems engineering and computer science engineering. "This is important because we want to continue appealing to all consumers while making driving easier and potentially safer for a wide range of people."

Analyzing fonts

The study of fonts is nothing new. Typography has been analyzed as far back as World War II, as the military studied fonts in the cockpits of aircrafts and the bridges of ships. Studies continued in the 1950s and 1960s, as manufacturers strived to make all the household convenience items such as washing machines, ovens and televisions easier to use for consumers.

O'Day's study focused on two parts: The characteristics of fonts - their sizes and shapes - and the contrast levels under which older drivers were able to read them.

She divided a controlled study group into three age groups and tested them wearing thick "occlusion goggles." Those goggles, which resemble oversized sunglasses with shutters, are opened or closed by remote computer control to restrict or allow vision.

"When the goggles are open, that allows the subject to look through them and read the task at hand," said O'Day. "We had our test subjects read a string of characters in different fonts. We would open and close the goggles, replicating a person driving, looking at a center stack display and then glancing back at the road. We'd time the subjects, looking at how many cycles it took for them to read through the characters, and how many they got right and wrong."

The age groups were: under age 45; age 45 to 59; and 60 and over. The oldest test subject was 91.

There were 15 test conditions in all for the three age groups, and in the end it was easy to see that the older group had the most challenges.

These results match medical trends: Doctors say our eyes exhibit a natural age-related decline in performance. It begins after the age of 40, and tends to increase as we reach our 60s and beyond. The lens of the eye begins to harden, and our focusing ability lessens. Our visual field narrows, and our ability to see in low light decreases.

The test also demonstrated that when the older group could easily read a particular font, the two younger groups could read it as well.

"One of the things this study told me is that with due care, there are many ways of making a font easy to read for older people," said O'Day. "And if it's easy for older people to read, it's going to be easy for everyone to read."

The fonts that enabled the best performance - the lowest reading errors, the fastest reading time - had a subtle combination of characteristics: larger height, wider width and thinner stroke.

"Everything has to work together," said O'Day. "There really is a balancing act."